This month’s Crimewave column might as well be titled the “Canadian Masters” edition. For the three books under review here are all by celebrated crime writers of this country, several novels deep into their respective series, which are consistently entertaining, well-written, and thoughtful. There may be fluctuations among individual instalments, but there’s a reason we keep reading whatever Peter Robinson, Maureen Jennings, and Barbara Fradkin publish: they are so rooted in the fundamentals of telling a good crime story, creating worlds we want to spend time in, populated by characters—main and supporting—we are compelled to care about. They make it look effortless, to boot. What’s not to admire?

Let’s start with Abbatoir Blues (McClelland & Stewart, 367 pp., $29.95 hardcover), the 22nd Inspector Banks novel by Peter Robinson. By now readers have a well-developed sense of who DCI Banks is and what he stands for: integrity laced with doubt, romanticism shot through with melancholy, but at a quieter, less tortured (and alcohol-laden) pitch than many of Banks’ colleagues in fictional policing. In this year’s installment, Banks, DI Cabbot, and rest of the Homicide and Major Crimes team are out in a rural area on the outskirts of Eastvale.

What begins as a hunt for a missing tractor grows far more gruesome with the discovery of a human body butchered like an animal at one of the area’s nearby slaughterhouses. Add the disappearance of a couple of local boys, a hint of organized crime, and Banks and company are well on their way to solving a most complicated mystery. Abattoir Blues is more of a straight procedural than earlier Banks adventures, the digressions into his romantic life here more muted than in the previous boosk. I was particularly keen to see more time spent on DI Winsome Jackman, one of my favourite of the supporting characters, but the subplots never interfere with the expert crime plotting gears Robinson has honed over nearly thirty years of work.

Moral ambiguity doesn’t cut it for the murders of the defenceless

Maureen Jennings may have put her Inspector Murdoch series behind her – that said, you can still catch the multi-episode adaptation in reruns – but the hallmarks that made those 1890s-Toronto-set novels work are just as apparent in her new project, three books in, set in early 1940s England. In No Known Grave (McClelland & Stewart, 341 pp., $19.95 trade paper) Detective Inspector Tom Tyler has moved to the market town of Ludlow, Shropshire (“new town, new position” [p. 19] where he ought to have some time to get accustomed to his new bearings.

“Ought”, however, is a loaded word, as Tyler quickly discovers. Instead he’s drafted into investigative duty when a father and son are found shot, execution-style, near the grounds of an old manor transformed into a nursing station staffed by nuns. They are a varying lot, from the winsome Sister Rachel, the crush object of several infirm military patients, to Sister Rebecca, the indomitable leader, who can’t quite grasp that one of the men they are caring for may be a ruthless killer.

The mystery, as always, is suspenseful and well-paced, but Jennings, here as in Beware This Boy and Season of Darkness beforehand, is after a larger story: how ordinary people muster the courage to survive endless combat and the accompanying fear and dread. At one point DI Tyler must reckon with one particularly negative by-product, when a military man reminds him that, even when murders are being investigated, “in times of war, ordinary justice doesn’t always get the first look in. Longer-term goals and all that.” [241]. Tyler, and thus the reader, never forgets that moral ambiguity doesn’t cut it for the murders of the defenceless.

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What if your entire career was built around an achievement that turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened? For Inspector Michael Green, Barbara Fradkin’s Ottawa-based police detective who returns for the tenth time in None So Blind (Dundurn, 382 pp. $17.99 trade paper) his rise up the ranks may not have been possible if not for his work twenty years before securing the arrest and eventual conviction of a college professor for the murder of a female student named Jackie Carmichael.

Never mind that the professor in question, James Rosten, persisted in claiming innocence time and again by letter to the Inspector, and continued to do so after his parole. But when Rosten is found dead, and the initial speculation of suicide gives way to the more concrete ruling of murder, Green must not only investigate the present crime, but re-examine his own role, culpability, and the dawning realization that he made a terrible mistake whose price has yet to be paid out.

Fradkin’s sense of compassion has always been a hallmark of her series, and once more it is present as Inspector Green must come to a serious professional and personal reckoning. The conclusions he must reach draw from a well of ugliness, of decades-old sins that have no expiration date, and of two families – Rosten’s and Carmichael’s – who will suffer further. Assumptions are dangerous, Green discovers, but even when further blood is shed, wrongs can still be righted.

***Sarah Weinman’s Crimewave column appears most every month in the Post.

Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal
Eric Dezenhall
Twelve
$30.00; 238 pgs

There is no doubt that we all live in a treacherous media environment. None of us are immune. Who among us, asks Eric Dezenhall, in Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending FragileReputations in an Age of Instant Scandal, has never “made a snide remark about an acquaintance, written an email on a sensitive subject, forwarded an ignorant joke, made a flirty comment, done something stupid in college, been in a situation where we’d rather not be photographed, opened a raunchy or peculiar Internet link?” It used to be we could shrug off these mistakes — but no longer. “Today, the worst aspects of ourselves are suspended in digital museums for the world to behold and recoil from forever,” writes Dezenhall.

Dezenhall, head of an American “crisis management” company for corporations and individuals under media siege, makes his living trying to salvage people’s reputations in our treacherous media environment. It is not an easy job. According to Dezenhall, in this age of “instant scandal,” of unremitting, real-time news cycles, rapid-fire Twitter, popular websites and blogs — the whole world of social media — targets of media attacks have little choice but to ride out the storm. “The realistic objective of crisis management,” Dezenhall writes, “is to endure controversy, not escape it.”

If this sounds gloomy, Dezenhall reminds us that “endurance is the most unheralded brand of genius.” It is that genius, Dezenhall states, that allows a “scandal maestro” such as Bill Clinton to stay in the game for all these years, with no end in sight. But it is part of Clinton’s genius to manage, as it were, his acknowledged guilt and keep his transgressions within certain bounds — whereas Congressman Andrew Wiener, famous for taking photographs of his crotch, held a press conference and tried to talk his way out of scandal, when his guilt, Dezenhall writes, was “absolute, provable and non-negotiable.”

The guilt of Jian Ghomeshi — allegedly subjecting women to violent, non-consensual sex — is a fatal charge, if proven. There can be no comeback for such a crime. But if Ghomeshi feels he has a defense against this charge he may be tempted at this point, at the height of the furor, to go public with his story. Dezenhall would urge him to do otherwise. “One of the most powerful human urges when faced with scandal is to talk, and talk a lot,” Dezenhall writes. “Verbal diarrhea is always self-exculpatory and involves a lot of denial. Stream-of-consciousness expression is inevitably fraught with half-truths, untruths, and self-incrimination.”

But surely, one can imagine a Dezenhall client wailing, shouldn’t I get the chance to tell my story? “In almost every case I have ever worked on, the client believed he or she had a good story to tell,” Dezenhall responds. “This is a wish, not a strategy. Many in the media only want to hear your side of the story to boost ratings and win awards at your expense. Another problem is that your side of the story may be terrible.”

But if it is true, as many people believe, that Ghomeshi is a narcissist, there may be no holding him back. “There isn’t much that can be done to restrain the mega-famous, rich, and powerful from being faithful to their natures,” Dezenhall writes. (This may hold true for people like Ghomeshi, who are only moderately famous, merely high-salaried, and powerful mostly within the confines of the CBC.)

In this world, the strong become the prey of the weak.

When the scandal first broke, Ghomeshi did post a statement on his Facebook page. “Let me be the first to say that my tastes in the bedroom may not be palatable to some folks,” it began. This, as Dezenhall might have warned, did him no good. Ghomeshi has since clammed up.

Glass Jaw — the term comes from boxing, and refers to a formidable looking opponent who can’t take a punch — is not a book for the Ghomeshis of the world, in any case. It is really meant for individuals and corporations who are likely culpable targets of media attack. Dezenhall’s thesis is that once mighty corporations, in particular, are vulnerable to scandals engendered by “the bathroom brigade” — a group he defines as “the diffuse army of millions who wage war on the world from their kitchen table laptops at no cost.” Complementing this brigade are activists with comparatively large budgets, NGOs, whistle blowers, plaintiff’s lawyers who leak information to news media, and so on. In this world, the strong become the prey of the weak.

Technology is the great enabler, and Dezenhall does not merely mean by this the ubiquitous cameras that have made “creeping surveillance our permanent habitat.” Dezenhall reminds us of how risky it once was to steal documents from an office. Now leaking important documents is just a few clicks away on a computer.

Dezenhall has no doubt that corporations have done very bad things and in many cases deserve to be held accountable by even a frenzied media, but admits that his long experience of defending corporations from patently false accusations by individuals and organizations has skewed his sympathies. “While the theoretical power of the ‘far right’ frightens a lot of people, when it comes to organizing boycotts and affecting consumer behaviour I have found that its influence pales in comparison to what more progressive groups can do,” Dezenhall writes.

Consider the great Toyota uproar. It began in 2009 when a car accident was said to have been caused by a Toyota engine defect leading to spontaneous acceleration. “Toyota ceased all sales in the United States, a highly unusual move,” Dezenhall writes. “The company lost $2 billion in sales and spent $1.1 billion to settle individual lawsuits, plus another $1.6 billion to settle class action claims associated with the loss in value of customers’ cars. This does not include the billions spent on the operational costs of the recalls themselves.”

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The story, accompanied by “exhaustive news coverage,” began to turn around after some obviously doubtful claims against Toyota were pressed. Examinations conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) subsequently vindicated Toyota. There was no such engine defect causing spontaneous acceleration in Toyotas.

The NASA report did not result in banner headlines — and Toyota did not rush to publicize it. “Why didn’t Toyota tout its vindication?” Dezenhall asks. “Because doing so would have reignited the controversy at a time when the brand was regaining consumer confidence…”

It is harder to find examples of famous individuals who have overcome scandal the way Toyota eventually did. Golfing superstar Tiger Woods may be a case in point. The revelations of his womanizing resulted in the break-up of his marriage, loss of endorsements and his severe humiliation in general, but he kept his mouth shut and eventually re-built his life. It was as good an outcome for him as could be expected — but, then, as Dezenhall points out, he had his core talent to fall back upon. The scandal had nothing to do with his golfing.

Here’s another factor working against Ghomeshi. His core talent — engaging listeners in his conversation — can quickly fade if those listeners suspect that the man behind the microphone is really not a nice man.

Wendy is a deeply funny three-part comic book chronicling the trials of an art-school grad in an unnamed Canadian city, navigating the space between galleries and punk shows, artist residencies and jobs slinging espresso. The specifics, and the way they’re gently derided, will likely be comforting to anyone under-employed and under-30 trying to make it in the arts in Canada, but its author, Walter Scott, makes Wendy’s journey to figure out her place in the world relatable enough for anyone who’s ever had to do the same—so basically, everyone.

When Scott first scribbled Wendy on a diner placemat after breakfast one morning, however, he had no audience in mind. “I just wanted to make myself laugh,” he explains. “Even when a lot of people got into it, I realized I needed to keep making it for myself because if I have a specific audience in mind then I stop being able to write from an honest place.” The result is a multi-panel graphic novel, where Wendy’s adventures — rendered in black-and-white through wiggly line drawings and halftone backgrounds — parallel Scott’s own experiences since graduating from Concordia’s fine arts program back in 2009.

I just wanted to make myself laugh

The story begins as Wendy, also fresh out of art school, struggles to finish an application to an artist residency, all the while, constantly being distracted by boys in bands and boozing with her besties. From the beginning, there’s a tension between high-brow and low-brow creative worlds, and Scott makes the juxtaposition between Wendy’s art-discourse jargon and party-girl lingo comically jarring. In the way the two worlds constantly grind up against each other, Scott captures certain class anxieties, like the ones we might feel when some measures of success are alienating to the people we love.

The Wendy book, out this month on Toronto-based Koyama Press, anthologizes three Wendy comics. (Scott self-published the first two in 2011 and 2012, respectively, and they’re reissued here along with a brand new third story.) Scott says that the feedback he recieved from the first comic has influenced subsequent ones. Initially, some readers were skeptical about Scott writing from the perspective of a female character. “I’d never really been a writer before, but I started paying more attention to the way alt lit writers represent themselves,” he explained. “I’m not just creating things in a vacuum. I realized you can create political ideas with writing and with a comic book. That’s when I decided to inject Winona into it.”

Winona is a First Nations character introduced in the second comic. Scott himself is First Nationsm, and grew up on the Kahnawake reserve outside of Montreal. “It wasn’t a stretch to try to accommodate a larger political ideal but to inject that possibility into something that was still very personal for me—another avatar that I could explore and make myself laugh with,” he explains. (Another character present from the first comic is Wendy’s gay best friend Screamo, whose face resembles the dude from Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and who allows Scott to explore another facet of his identity as a gay man.)

In the second comic, Wendy and Winona are roommates at an artist residency—the fictional Flojo Island residency is loosely based on the Banff Centre residency Scott has attended, and, throughout the book, a back-drop of application writing and artist-run centres feel as Canadian as a Heritage Minute. At the residency, Wendy has a new crush on an arts writer and collaborates with Winona on a performance, treacherously trying to manage the fuzzy line between her personal relationships and professional ones, and ultimately having everything end fairly disastrously. “She is kind of sunnier at the beginning of the book and she gets kind of dark at the end,” explains Scott, “that goes along with how I was experiencing things.”

In the third and final installation in the book, this trend toward darkness continues as Wendy’s fumbles seem to cut closer to her core. An art direction gig taunts Wendy, as she takes a job at a cafe that she hopes will be temporary. Her new job conflicts with her former party-girl lifestyle but her attempts to be a responsible grown-up don’t fulfill her either. She worries she’s grinding away at this day-job making coffee but stagnating as an artist, just like the cafe’s manager who she eventually starts dating. Even as Wendy’s life implodes, the comic stays funny and stays away from cynicism.

Wendy is clearly a product of someone with years of experience narrating their own pain and suffering as funny stories for friends, where comedic timing and choice details make tragic moments at once absurd, tender, and okay to laugh at. “In my own life, I learned really quickly how to use humor and sarcasm as an ironic distance from what was going on around me,” explains Scott.

I learned really quickly how to use humor and sarcasm as an ironic distance from what was going on around me

Although the comic certainly makes fun of the trappings of both the world of galleries and after-hour loft parties, ultimately, the book suggests that making art is a worthwhile pursuit. It’s the art jargon, social climbing, and dumb band names that are caricatured but still never with too much of a sneer because, at the end of the day Wendy, like everyone else in her universe, has elected to participate in the absurd ways we’ve collectively legitimized being a “creative” person.

If you look closely, the book explores how art can be an externalization of internal emotional states. Each of the three comics within the book is prefaced by a quote from three different women writers—punk experimental novelist Kathy Acker, Canadian Aboriginal performance artist Skeena Reece, and iconic essayist Joan Didion. All three are about the relationship of mind and body, our insides coming outside of us, and our deepest darkest feelings becoming externalized on the page. Wendy’s own insides are always spilling out. She vomits, sweats, and cries. The crude line drawings that make up the heroine are subject to her emotional state—when she’s boy crazy her eyes are two hearts, when she’s on a bender they’re two vacuous black holes, and when she’s about to cry her whole body is outlined with a wiggly line. It’s another autobiographical aspect of the comic. “I have this somatic problem where my body and mind are really connected. Illness and the body are tied so much to emotions,” explains Scott. Like Wendy, Scott’s an artist and lately, he’s been exploring this mind-body connection in his sculptural work as well.

The book finishes on an open-ended note, and Scott has no plans to stop writing Wendy comics. “She going to grow up just like I’m growing up,” he explains. “I guess there’s potential for Wendy to get a bit boring, but I just have to keep digging inside myself to find the most interesting parts to put on the page.” But as art imitates life, life is also imitating art. Someone suggested Scott could maybe get a job in California as a storyboard artist for the Cartoon Network. “Then I had a moment thinking, ‘wait Wendy would never do that!’” he says. “It’s a bit demented, I think, to lead your life to serve your character.” For now, Scott has no plans to become a storyboard artist and, in Wendy style, he’s relocating to Toronto “to get a job or something.”

* * *Whitney Mallett’s writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hazlitt, and Maisonneuve.

Who won the first televised US presidential debate? It depends who you ask. According to radio listeners, Richard Nixon defeated John F. Kennedy on that fateful day in 1960. But according to TV viewers—and there were 70 million of them—the fresh-faced Kennedy trounced the pale, unshaven VP. Why the discrepancy? Nixon ignored his team’s advice to wear makeup. The media-savvy candidate won. Thus, a new era of media-centric electioneering began.

TV’s rise coincided with the decline of social institutions—churches, trade unions, political parties—that had long shaped voter behaviour. Media outlets became battlegrounds for political campaigns. Before long, politicians turned to the persuasion experts on Madison Avenue. By 1964, DDB was helping Lyndon Johnson paint Barry Goldwater as a warmonger. By 1978, Saatchi & Saatchi were consulting with Thatcher’s Conservatives.

Back then, these partnerships were controversial; advertising’s role in politics—transforming politicians into brands and platforms into slogans—was the subject of much handwringing. Nowadays, such handwringing seems quaint. More notable, perhaps, are the campaign materials designed not by professional art directors, but by grassroots supporters. Like Shepard Fairey, whose “Hope” poster defined Obama’s 2008 campaign.

For Toronto-based marketing strategist Clive Veroni, the Fairey poster reflects a turning point. After a half-century of politicos learning from marketers, Veroni writes in Spin, “the flow of knowledge has reversed.” His book, he says, will “trace that transformation, as the lessons of political campaigning move from the political war room to the boardroom.” Spin promises to pick up where Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab—which explores the campaign tactics, data mining, behavioural economics and psychology that transformed recent elections—leaves off. Veroni identifies three key sites of this transformation: audience segmentation; message transmission; and human resources.

Early in Spin, we learn of Stephen Harper’s decision to snub Earth Day in 2008, brightly lighting 24 Sussex as the world powered down. The move raised the ire of environmentalists and sounded “a dog whistle” for loyalists. We learn of fashion designer Tom Ford, whose YSL fragrance ad of 2000, featuring a nearly nude Sophie Dahl, generated complaints but resonated with the fashion crowd. Both men—kindred spirits, no doubt—understood that “if you blow the right whistle you’ll attract your most committed tribe of followers. And that can build tremendous loyalty, even while it might anger others.” The breezy, entertaining anecdotes reflect a recurring flaw of Spin: They are connected in a loose, thematic sense, but fail to reflect any meaningful flow of knowledge.

Veroni later argues that speed is crucial for marketers to seize opportunities and confront challenges. The chapter is called, “Speed Kills,” an axiom coined by James Carville, who led Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992, a year after CNN birthed the 24-hour news cycle. Speed still kills: Just look at Oreo’s “You can still dunk in the dark” ad, which was conceived, written, designed, approved and Tweeted during the 34-minute power outage that interrupted the 2012 Superbowl. The ad generated some half-billion impressions, stealing the show on a night when 30 seconds of airtime (to reach 100 million viewers) cost $4 million. The secret to Oreo’s success “was not its creative brilliance but the sheer speed with which it [was] executed.” Agile and responsive, Oreo joined the public conversation in real time, diving into the “democratized world of communications, where the consumer is no longer just the passive receiver of marketing messages.” The parallels to Carville are clear, but the reader is left to wonder: Had Oreo’s digital team just watched the Clinton campaign documentary, The War Room, or are they just good at the internet?

Veroni keenly understands a now well-accepted truth about advertising: It’s dying. In a crowded media landscape, it’s tougher than ever to persuade and mobilize people. At the same time, political campaigns have been doing just that with remarkable success. (Little surprise, perhaps, that innovation has followed the flow of capital; the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaigns cost roughly $2 billion—more than McDonald’s global ad budget.) Veroni’s thesis is timely and apt. Regrettably, he fails to tell the story he describes.

No doubt, Civis Analytics could have warranted more attention. The company, founded by former Obama data guru Dan Wagner, has applied its conjoint analysis techniques, honed during the campaign, to scooter-maker Piaggio’s communications. Same for Blue State Digital, an agency with political roots, which has built a social network for Green Bay Packers fans, and boosted subscriptions for Vogue.

Perhaps the flaws of Spin are an apt metaphor for the ad industry itself: Its players can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. They can talk about the changing landscape with great conviction, but dig a little deeper and it becomes clear: Nobody really knows what’s happening.

***Benjamin Leszcz is a principal of the design and communications consultancy, Whitman Emorson.

This post has been updated to correct an error. An earlier version of this review suggested that Cllive Veroni made no mention of Civic Analytics in Spin, when in fact he does.

The book industry in Canada has many moving parts, and they are all intricately connected; from the author, to the publisher, to the distributor, to the retailer, to the library, all the way to the reader. That chain is a highly integrated supply system, and when you remove any component from it, it has implications all the way down the line—for writers, for readers, and for everyone else in between.

This has been tough week for book publishing in Canada. HarperCollins, U.S.-based multinational publisher, is closing down its distribution centre. In recent years, several Canadian-owned publishers have worked with the publishing company to distribute their books out of the HarperCollins warehouse in Ontario. HarperCollins titles will now be distributed solely from America. The decision to close the warehouse here will result in the loss of 120 Canadian jobs, including the position of CEO of HarperCollins Canada. David Kent, who has held that particular post for the past 13 years, is an ardent champion of Canadian writers, and is now without a job.

If more of the components of the supply chain were in Canadian hands, Canadian readers would have better access to Canadian writing.

The removal of one distributor from this country to another doesn’t mean will books no longer flow through the system—that’s not the challenge; the challenge is that the entire chain, and therefore the entire industry is weakened. Each element of the supply chain supports the whole of the industry. The business activity generated by distributing operations helps support all of Canadian publishing, which in turn supports our country’s writers.

Almost all of the larger distributors in Canada are publishing companies that have added distribution services to help underwrite the cost of their publishing programs. This was certainly true of HarperCollins Canada. That warehouse is what allowed them to publish Canadian-authored books.

Nobody can deny David Kent’s passion for Canadian writing or his commitment to his authors, but in the end, it’s not up to him. It never has been. Ultimately the decision about whether or HarperCollins will publish, let alone distribute Canadian authors has been made by Americans. Decisions about what any business does are made by the owners of the business. And if those owners are in another country, then that’s where those decisions are made, with limited regard to the specialized considerations of publishing for Canadian readers, or the needs of a Canadian market.

If more of the components of the chain were in Canadian hands, Canadian readers would have better access to Canadian writing. When a greater number of links in the chain are Canadian owned and operated, we are able to put more Canadian writing into that chain.

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As it stands, Americans are making major decisions about Canadian writing, especially when it is multinational corporations deciding what to publish, or wholesalers compiling offerings for Canadian libraries, or online retailers promoting (or not promoting) Canadian titles to consumers. Those decisions, at the highest level, are often made without any specialized knowledge of who the up-and-coming Canadian writers are, what ideas are circulating in the country right now, or the concerns that matter most to Canadians today.

The commitments of any enterprise can never be as strong as they are when the owner and operator is actually in the country it is serving. We as Canadian readers deserve an industry controlled and run by people in the best position to make great books that will inform Canadians about each other, and to show the what our writers are capable of—the closer those decisions are made to Canada, the better for everybody.

I never really got into Parks & Recreation, the sitcom Amy Poehler stars in, and stopped watching Saturday Night Live before she joined the cast. Yet, I’m a fan. She’s a bad-ass little lady (by which I mean she’s short) who is unapologetic about her edgy humour (see: 2013 Golden Globe joke about equating torture with being married to James Cameron), about not playing the Hollywood air kiss game (see: “It’s a hot load of bulls–t,” her response to colleague Nick Offerman not receiving an Emmy nomination), about being a strong woman who helps other women (see: Smart Girls at the Party!, a supportive, educational online community for girls). So my expectations were high when I cracked open Yes Please, Poehler’s memoir/essay collection/advice tome.

With the book’s publication, she joins a list of other funny women who have in recent years published similar books — Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Caitlin Moran, to name a few. Poehler, herself, names these women and others in her introduction, which is mostly about how hard writing can be and how, being neither cute nor wise, she’s at an odd point in her life to write such a book. Plus, of course, she jokes about how these women who’ve published before her have done such stellar jobs that she really shouldn’t be doing this at all.

It’s the old under-promise and over-deliver trick — one that I suspect served her career very well when she was starting out. She never comes out and says such a thing, but Poehler’s stories of her early career are told with such a perfect blend of appreciation, politesse and determination that it can easily be believed that it’s one of her rules to live by. Some of her other rules are littered throughout the book, written in bold, colourful letters across a double-page spreads: “Figure out what you want. Say it loud. Then shut up.” “Nothing is anyone’s business.” “Forget the facts and remember the feelings.”

Life advice is where Poehler excels. Her chapters about her childhood, start in comedy and award-winning sitcom are pleasant journeys down memory lane. It’s refreshing, albeit not exactly riveting to read that she loves her parents, had a healthy childhood and values her colleagues. She is expertly skilled at talking about personal issues without revealing anything private — take her chapter on divorce, which isn’t really about hers, from Arrested Development star Will Arnett, but about the topic in general — but she’s so pointedly funny while doing it I didn’t really care I wasn’t learning about her. In fact, I came to appreciate it; Poheler’s penchant for witty near-deflections seem like quite a valuable skill to have.

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Poehler is at her strongest when she takes herself to task recounting, in not particularly flattering light, how she learned her own life rules. In a chapter about an apology that was long overdue, difficult to make, but necessary to communicate, she describes how paralyzing both shame and guilt can be, but that an apology is “a glorious release.” “Your brain is not your friend when you need to apologize,” she writes.

In a chapter about children she met during a visit to Haiti with Worldwide Orphans Foundation, she writes about the intensity of need she witnessed in these kids, for everything from a hug to clothing. But five pages earlier? She’s walking readers through the internal debate of whether she’d have sex with her Haitian taxi driver (she would).

“We aren’t one story,” Poehler writes. She is referring to tragedies and how we shouldn’t let them define us, but it is a summary of her life — and life, in general. She’s had victories and made mistakes. She’s been kind to some people, and should have been kinder to others. She’s realized that there’s still lots to learn, even from her small children. And she’s done it all while being fiercely funny. Poehler under-promises, over-delivers—meeting and passing expectations along the way.

* * *Science … for Her!

By Megan Amram

Scribner

$32.00; 224 pgs

Megan Amram is a funny, smart woman. Many women’s magazines, which often seem to cater to the lowest common denominator, are neither funny nor smart. Depressing and anger-inducing are more appropriate descriptors. Her skewering of the genre in her first book Science … for Her! would seem like an ideal match. And it is in some ways. But I couldn’t help feeling, very quickly into the book, that her talents could’ve been used for something more substantial.

Between obsessing about ex-boyfriend Xander, weight loss and frenemies — in jest, obviously, because this is satire, but all very much in line with the sorts of topics you’d find covered in any issue of Cosmopolitan — Amram does actually provide some lessons on science, explaining radioactivity, for instance. And some of her best bits are when she follows up an earnest explanation of something with a skewering of a women’s magazine trope, like the listing of the Most Romantic Places to See Smog after an explanation of air pollution. Those best bits are wedged between numerous dumb blonde jokes, penis drawings and mentions of date rape. It’s all in jest — ;) — but it all could have been covered in a chapter, not spread out over an entire book.

Amram is talented: Forbes included her on its 2014 Hollywood 30 Under 30 list; she was a writer on Parks & Recreation; Rolling Stone called her one of the 25 funniest people on Twitter. I couldn’t help but wish she’d used her talents, dick doodles and all, on another topic. History, perhaps. Indeed, a two-page “review” of America — a criticism of the history of the country written as if it’s a plot line for an incredibly long-running and not particularly focused television series — shows what a missed opportunity this was. Commercial women’s magazine are deserving of a good skewering and she may well be the one to do it, but the form it takes here doesn’t work.

For a man who foretells doom, Andrew Wylie looks upbeat. There’s a glint in the literary super-agent’s cool green eyes as he contemplates a crucial time for his industry. Should negotiations between publishers and Amazon about ebook royalties “go south,” he says, “the whole culture will go to zero, and we’ll end up with a Berlusconi world of people in bikinis jumping up and down on game shows.”

This would not be a good situation — least of all for Wylie, who has built up a stable of nearly 1,000 clients, focusing on big, highbrow names such as Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and, in Canada, Ann-Marie MacDonald. Since founding The Wylie Agency in 1980, he has resolutely opposed the culture of the bestseller by convincing publishers to look at the long term, at books that might conceivably be read in the decades and centuries to come — that is, if the bunga-bunga doesn’t take over. And in order to ensure this, the man known as “The Jackal” for his predatory practices is now recasting himself as the publishing business’s unlikely saviour.

Wylie is both an insider and a rebel: He’s a Harvard graduate who spent much of the ’70s hanging out with Andy Warhol in a bohemian Manhattan demimonde. Nowadays, he’s a nattily attired iconoclast. A few hours before delivering an incendiary keynote address at the International Festival of Authors, Wylie sits at a Toronto harbourfront hotel bar and touts the future of the printed word. He’s convinced that old-fashioned literary values can triumph. Part of what’s necessary, he believes, is to speak out against an atmosphere of “terror” created by the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2012, it sued six publishers and Apple for collusion in setting their own plans to sell ebooks.

‘The business will be restored to health and authors can actually make more money’

“The Department of ‘Injustice’ lawsuit was the most unjust, misguided, insane suit in my mature life,” he says. “A lot of agents won’t talk about it publicly. A lot of publishers won’t. They can’t have lunch with each other without a lawyer being present to make sure they don’t say anything that could be interpreted as restraint of trade — otherwise known as restraining Amazon.”

Wylie readily admits, in his Massachusetts drawl, that he was once a big supporter of the e-retailer, going so far as to call up CEO and founder Jeff Bezos and offer to help him expand into Europe. He praised the idea that, unlike in a bookstore, backlist and literary titles could be on equal footing with bestsellers — the industry dependence on which he calls a “coked-up, crazy, wild weekend-in-Vegas approach to publishing.” Amazon’s dedication to the long tail, he thought, was key, but then with the introduction of the Kindle, he says, “the dark side of their intention began to be visible.”

Wylie recalls being threatened by “two gorillas from Amazon” in 2010 after he did a deal with Random House for a number of ebooks he had originally planned to sell directly through the e-retailer; they called him and said, “We’re going to drag you into court; we’re going to wear you out, and we’re going to put you out of business.” Even the supremely confident Jackal lost sleep over this. And yet, he remains defiant as ever: “We have an ISIS moment on the table, and Amazon likes to decapitate people.” To fight this, he touts the existence of a surprising coalition.

“What’s good for authors right now is that their interests are aligned with publishers, and that has not been the case for the last 30 years.” He points to the Penguin/Random House merger as a way of building up a company big enough to resist Amazon, and to Simon & Schuster’s recent “satisfactory” deal with the e-retailer over royalties. With more such deals, he says, “the business will be restored to health and authors can actually make more money.”

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Making more money is indeed something close to Wylie’s heart. His most famous coup involved securing a £500,000 advance — a then unheard-of sum for a literary title — for Martin Amis’s 1995 novel The Information after he poached him from his agent (who happened to be the wife of Amis’s friend Julian Barnes). Wylie maintains that the only way to get publishers to promote literary titles adequately is to convince them to pay handsomely in the first place. And as advances and royalties have generally dropped in recent years, his agency has prospered by operating in many markets. A self-declared “obsessive compulsive,” Wylie is known for starting his day on the phone to London at 5 a.m. and ending it in the evening on the phone to Japan — or now more often China, where his business is “going crazy.” Wylie grins. “It’s helpful to have Henry Kissinger as a client.”

Wylie often snaps up the rich and powerful, from Al Gore to Oracle founder Larry Ellison to David Bowie (“Our accountants, who are also his, invented the Bowie bond, which was quite a fruitful exercise”). Toward the end of their careers, many such figures decide to pen memoirs. “The desire and the pride that a person takes in that step in their life is disproportionately high. Why? Because the printed word lasts and lasts and lasts.”

For all the brouhaha over ebooks, Wylie says, they’re disposable; we always return to good old-fashioned books. He disputes the contention of his client Will Self that digital media has led to the death of the serious novel: “A number of writers have said, ‘We are at the end of the process,’ but I think that their feeling, which I respect and sympathize with, is akin to an Ebola panic in airports in the United States. Chances are things are going to work out.”

The Internet was not designed to be understood. That’s not to say that the Internet can’t be a tool for understanding; if used carefully, the Internet could live up to its reputation as the great democratizer, ensuring that everyone, anywhere, with a strong Wi-Fi connection, could achieve greatness.

Gabriella Coleman’s new book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous is an entry into a relatively new canon: literature seeking to understand and explain the constantly shifting idea of what the Internet is, and who we are as its users.

As a cultural anthropologist, Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. She has made Anonymous — a collective of people who congregate online for various purposes, from socializing to organizing activist movements to elaborate pranks — her subject for the last six years, going deep into what she describes as a maze that only generates more mazes.

Ego does not evaporate just because of the anonymity the Internet supposedly provides.

The progressive view of Internet-as-great-democratizer is just one version of what the Internet could be; the Internet’s other greatest potential is as a tool for immense cruelty. In her recent book, The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor detailed the mythology of the Internet as the world’s first and only open library, university, courtroom, public square and shopping mall; in reality, she argued, the Internet is just another way humanity can go about the business of perpetual corruption. Ego does not evaporate just because of the anonymity the Internet supposedly provides. In fact, it seems to have the opposite effect.

With Anonymous, Coleman has taken on the ego of an increasingly visible and misunderstood Internet-based subculture. My inclination is to call it an organization with no hierarchies, or an ideology with no principles, or a mentality with no humanity. Anonymous is defined on the principle of absolute openness; anyone who wants to be part of Anonymous automatically is — which has a flattening effect for those of us watching as casual onlookers. “Everyone and no one,” as a membership policy is radically democratic. And endlessly frustrating. Coleman identifies us — and herself — as an audience to the performance Anonymous is putting on, one that is not really meant to be understood but merely viewed from a safe distance.

In her attempts to understand the collective, Coleman embedded herself in Anonymous, searching for the faces behind the avatars. Her book reveals much about her process of working with such an intangible topic. At one point, Coleman describes a meeting “Adnon,” a member of Anonymous who helped publicize the January 2011 revolts in Tunisia; she characterizes their conversation as “30% gossip, 20% conspiracy, and 50% welcomed pedagogy about the innards of Anonymous.”

This is, perhaps, the same breakdown as the book itself. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is engaging, but I found it difficult to trust the legitimacy of much of the information. Anonymous is, as Coleman rightly points out, our latest incarnation of the trickster archetype; they’ve rose to prominence in mainstream media precisely because they take advantage of trusting journalists and outsiders, exploiting our biases and prejudices about the cultures and subcultures of the Internet. Even with Coleman’s legitimate academic credentials and extensive skills as a journalist, how can we really trust information that comes from such notorious tricksters? How can we trust her?

Coleman waits to address this concern until the book’s afterword, where she points out that much of her information comes from legal transcripts of members of Anonymous who were prosecuted for their crimes; not heresy, at least in the eyes of the Western legal system. “In instances where no documents existed, I have attempted to interview multiple participants and relied … on accounts published by respected media figures,” the best we can get under such unique circumstances. There is no precedent for verifying an organization like Anonymous because there is no direct precedent for this kind of book on this kind of subject at this kind of time.

In the end, the importance Coleman places on Anonymous as an agent for social change is exaggerated; I’m more inclined to agree with her when she says that Anonymous is a medium through which social change has happened, not the driving force behind said change. And her dedication struck me as odd: “[T]o the legions behind Anonymous,” she writes, “those who have donned the mask in the past, those who will still dare to take a stand today, and those who will surely rise again in the future,” not the sentiment I would expect from a neutral observer writing about something of anthropological importance to contemporary society.

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Still, the book is expertly written, easy to read without sacrificing any complexity — a necessary first step in what will be an increasingly important sociological canon. Mostly, I’m finding myself more and more in favour of books that aim to contextualize history as it happens. A book with more remove would not be a more accurate portrayal of what Anonymous means to our culture and us right now. When we want to look back at Anonymous, the impartial neutrality that comes with time won’t help; only a book like Coleman’s, full of urgency, will really show why and how Anonymous mattered at their time.

“We might even think of Nietzsche as the Enlightenment’s trickster,” Coleman writes says at one point. As for me, I will continue to think of Nietzsche as Nietzsche, and Puck as Puck, and Anonymous and Anonymous, when I think of culture’s tricksters. But her point is well taken: our understanding of what or who is culturally significant is not really something we can know in its own time. Even Nietzsche was, I’m sure, the subject of some pontificating freelance writer, now lost to the annals of history; no one in Shakespeare’s time knew Shakespeare would be Shakespeare.

Coleman’s role as a watcher and researcher of critics takes on more significance when she compares Anonymous to a play, paraphrasing, of course, Shakespeare: “If the world’s a stage…then what does that make the Internet? A play within a play, written in real time, with each player contributing line by line?” My question for this book, though, is to ask what this makes Coleman: critic, or chorus?

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This post has been corrected. An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote to Slim Amanou.

The Book of Ezekiel is one of the strangest books in the Bible, full of wild poetry and visions of God so weird and overpowering that a school of Biblical criticism maintains its author was deranged.

An old preacher named John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila does not share this view of the Jewish prophet but is hesitant when a woman unfamiliar with the Bible starts reading Ezekiel. It’s a “hard” book, he warns — hard to understand, hard to digest. But Robinson knows what she’s doing.

These days the kind of reader who would tackle Lila, a sophisticated literary fiction, is likely as ignorant of the Bible as the barely schooled woman of the book’s title — and one of Marilynne Robinson’s aims is to introduce those readers to a far more stringent, emotionally raw and profoundly soulful atmosphere than people are generally used to when they talk about “spirituality.”

The old preacher living in the Iowa town of Gilead — the character and the location will be familiar to readers of Robinson’s previous novel, Gilead — happens to be a saint. “Maybe the kindest man in the world,” according to Lila. No writer can depict a saint without straying at least a little bit into Ezekiel territory, with its air of profound mystery, especially the mystery of God’s mercy. In Canadian literature I can think only of David Adams Richards as a novelist brave enough to depict a man in pursuit of sanctity. Robinson’s task is especially difficult given that Robinson’s saint is a small town Calvinist preacher, not a type normally portrayed with sympathy by filmmakers or television writers.

It does help that the book is narrated not from his point of view but mostly from that of Lila, a girl of mysterious origins — at the outset of the novel she is living as a four-or- five-year-old with a rag tag group in the rural Midwest who may or may not be her kinfolk. “The spindliest damn child I ever saw,” one character comments. She is saved by a woman named Doll who displays saint-like devotion to Lila by snatching her away from probable death by starvation and negligence.

At first, Doll and Lila, fearful that the people she was snatched away from will try to find her, roam the countryside as a pair. “Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world,” Robinson writes, “and Lila was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.” Eventually, however, they join a band of itinerant field workers headed by a man named Doane.

The two remain dirt poor, but they have food to eat and Lila even enjoys a certain camaraderie with other girls in the band. Doane prides himself on keeping his informal family together — they are not tramps but industrious, honest, well-behaved workers. One of the saddest and most harrowing episodes is the slow disintegration of Doane’s band under the pressure of the Great Depression and the dust bowl. Work becomes harder and harder to find, and Doane’s pride in providing for his band withers away, until finally he is caught stealing and sentenced to jail.

Doll, meanwhile, has her own brush with the law, killing a man that may have been one of Lila’s original “family,” The murder weapon, a knife, is passed on to Lila as her only legacy from Doll—a symbol of Lila’s own resourcefulness, and the physical means by which she preserves her integrity. “That knife was the difference between her and anybody else in the world,” Robinson writes. Not even the Bible can match it for potency. “I’m keeping that knife,” Lila declares. “It ain’t very Christian of me. Such a mean old knife.”

There are other episodes involving Lila, chiefly a brief period spent in a St. Louis brothel, a horrible, disgusting, prison-like environment that makes field work seem like paradise. In order to lend urgency and emotional depth to the central act of the narrative — Lila’s stumbling into John Ames’s church seeking shelter from the rain, followed some time later by their unlikely marriage — the heroine must indeed undergo horrific trials. It’s an old storyteller’s trick.

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Lila emerges from her ordeals a damaged soul, who can barely bring herself to accept the love of her husband from shame at her ignorance and a general feeling of worthlessness. She is, after all, an orphan, and therefore, as one girl in Doane’s band puts it, somebody who “sort of turned out wrong.” Can she overcome her loneliness? For that matter can Ames, a widower who’s “had his share of loneliness,” according to Lila’s discerning eye, deal with his own doubts?

One difference between the two is that Ames has recourse to his Bible — but that doesn’t make any easier his attempt to “think of a way to speak to her,” Robinson writes. At least he offers no platitudes, no glib assurances, in his reply to her questions — age-old questions — about God’s allowing his human creatures to suffer. “Life is a very deep mystery,” Ames tells Lila, “and finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it.” Meanwhile loneliness seems to be ingrained in us — ingrained even in our fallen world. Lila at one point perceives that the wind “is tired of its huge loneliness.” Lila and her husband are also tired of their loneliness. “I can’t love you as much as I love you,” Lila cries, confessing her aloneness.

Lila is not an easy book to comprehend. The prose is never deliberately obscure but it requires careful reading and re-reading to determine what refers to whom. The examination of characters’ thoughts is nuanced and subtle, and the shifting of time scenes is complex. But the narrative basis is solid, the sentiments deeply felt, and the prose, reflecting this depth and sincerity, is at times beautifully resonant.

Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing has been called a difficult book. There are no commas, fragments abound, and the prose doesn’t so much envelop its reader as poke and jab its way into one’s brain. Even considering the syntactical breakdown of McBride’s debut novel — the first line, in the narrator’s second-person singular voice, reads, “For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name.” — “difficult” is a loaded word for a text that tries so hard to get you to viscerally understand the changing mind of one woman over the first third of her life.

Elizabeth Wurtzel praised difficult women in Bitch, her 1999 book chronicling a centuries-long narrative of women breaking the rules, and McBride’s Girl certainly qualifies. The titular Girl comes to life through McBride’s prose as mess of synapses, learning to live and eventually rebel against the hypocritical Catholicism practiced by her family, kenning to the constant negotiations posed by being sexually desirous and desired in a world where sexualized violence is a perpetual threat, dealing with the minor and major tragedies she’s fated to experience over the course of her messy, fractured life. In Bitch, Wurtzel complains “that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated, the ones who are so intriguing that new men fall in love with them everyday … in any instance where someone can get to know them a little bit, just enough to get completely gone.” She could be describing McBride’s Girl.

I really wanted to write about female sexuality in a very different way

“I really wanted to write about female sexuality in a very different way,” McBride tells me in the lobby of her hotel. While she lives with her husband and two-year-old daughter in her native Ireland, she’s in Toronto to give a reading at the International Festival of Authors, having been touring with A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing since its release 18 months go. None of the characters in McBride’s novel have been given first names, and she laughs when I suggest that many of them are almost archetypes of classic Irish literary characters — a perverted uncle, a drunken, hyper-religious mother, a sexually (and secularly) rebellious daughter, an absent father. McBride calls her narrator “Girl,” and does so with such warmth in her voice it almost takes me aback.

“I think,” McBride continues, that romantic love is “something that women have been told is one of the major fulfillments of their lives. To find love. To meet someone, to have children, to settle down. That no matter how high-powered you are, how successful you are, no matter how much you enjoy your work, you will remain unfulfilled unless you concede these various things.” Girl, by contrast, is looking for something else in her voracious sex life; her appetite is bodily and immediate, and she navigates her own desire without the aid of a culturally approved map. “It was a real relief to write a character outside of that, and to write outside these issues. To actually side-step them completely was a real pleasure,” McBride says. (Wurtzel, for her part, wrote “most men in the end don’t quite have the stomach for that much person.”)

The difficulty of either the Girl or the text made publishing A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing into a kind of herculean challenge; McBride wrote three drafts of the novel during a six-month period in 2003 and 2004, and immediately began sending out her manuscript. “People sort of admired the book, but didn’t really know what to do with it,” she says. Marketing departments would veto her work, considering the book too challenging, or too niche, to take a risk on. “Which really surprised me,” McBride says, “because I thought, well, it’s kind of modernism, and it’s been around for a while. It’s not outside the ball park.” McBride sighs, reliving the disappointment she felt at realizing how risk-adverse the publishing climate has become. The same, she says, cannot be said of readers. “The fundamental difference,” she grins. “Which is why the book has now, finally, been successful.”

I wanted to create the story in the nuts and bolts of speech and thought

Shortly after being published in the U.K. this past spring, McBride’s Girl was awarded the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was just the beginning. After sitting in a drawer for nine years, A Girl is a Half-Formed thing has gone on to win several prizes, both in Ireland, the U.K. and internationally. The critical reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with feature reviews in The London Review of Books and The New Yorker. But more importantly to McBride, the book is resonating with many different kinds of readers, all over the world. “My secret hope had always been that it wouldn’t get ghettoized into a sort of academic strain — as though it would only be interesting to people who were interested in modernism or something,” she says. “And actually that’s the last thing that’s happened. It’s gone out into the world and all sorts of people are reading it and identifying with it.”

Identifying with the novel’s narrator is surprisingly easy, considering the inventive syntax and unpolished fragments McBride used, not to mention the grief and violence that accounts for so much of the plot of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. (I joke that it’s going to be hard to describe the book for this piece, and McBride winsomely suggests I use the word “cheery.”) Or perhaps it’s better to say that the formal innovations McBride plays with are in fact the very reason it’s so easy to identify with the book—the language reels around, self-interrupting, coming together and dissembling before a clear picture emerges.

Reading A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing puts readers in the mind of a thinking person, before that person has had the chance to shape her experiences into memory, into the narrative of her life. “It was definitely about trying to make the experience completely immediate to the reader, so that they are in on what’s happening at the moment it’s happening,” McBride says. “So when she experiences it, the reader experiences it, before she has a chance to think about it, process it, and set it out into whatever various niches she needs to in order to make it work in her life.”

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McBride’s Girl has frequently been identified as continuing a legacy of modernism, which is accurate. It has also been described as a stream-of-consciousness novel, which it is not. While McBride acknowledges James Joyce influenced her early in her writing career — “I thought everything is possible!, after I read Ulysses,” she says — the whole point of Girl is that is burbles beneath consciousness, a technique that pedants and quibblers might call “stream-of-cognition.” McBride undertook a nearly impossible project: using language to access the kind of thinking that happens before we turn that thinking into language. McBride says her technical approach to writing the novel emerged from a simple, almost utilitarian consideration. “Because if the thought isn’t linear, then the language can’t be linear, either.

“I really wanted to create the story in the nuts and bolts of speech and thought, and kind of leave it to the reader to join it all together and see what came out of it,” McBride says. In the end, it’s not so difficult to see why readers might want to piece it together. And despite — no, because of, her too-muchness — spending time in Girl’s mind is a privilege, even during the most brutal and heartbreaking parts of the book. “You write the character and you want other people to understand her. Not to judge her, or like her or dislike her, or any of those things. But just to feel that they have understood something else about someone, in a way that maybe they haven’t before,” McBride says. “That’s the best thing one could hope for.”